Desires by Celia Dropkin

Book Talk Co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center In Person: Admission: Free Zoom Livestream: Admission: Free Watch the video

Desires (White Goat Press, 2024), the only novel by Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin (1887–1956), was originally serialized between March 31 and June 6, 1934, in the Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Anita Norich’s new translation brings this novel to English readers.

Dropkin was born in Babruysk, a city in what is now Belarus, and immigrated to New York in 1912, where she adopted Yiddish as her primary literary language. In the 1930s, she turned to prose, publishing this novel and ten short stories that appeared in the journal Tsukunft (Future). In Desires, as in much of her work, Dropkin reflects on the internal and external conflicts of love, domesticity, and the erotic life. Through characters carefully drawn from her own immigrant milieu, Dropkin addresses the yearnings of both the body and mind, the tension between excitement and security, and the conflicting impulses that are part of the human condition.

Join YIVO for a discussion about this new translation with Norich in conversation with Director of Publishing and Public Programs at the Yiddish Book Center, Lisa Newman.

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories. She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991), and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

Lisa Newman is director of publishing and public programs at the Yiddish Book Center and Director of White Goat Press, the Yiddish Book Center’s imprint.